Lauren Hulbert’s new single “Gone In One”

Drinks in the park. Casual strolls on the beach. The runaway good times we have as a single youth are something to cherish, but when someone suddenly comes around trying to cage an untamable free bird, breaking free isn’t just inevitable – it’s necessary for survival. This is the music video for Lauren Hulbert’s new single “Gone In One,” and although it’s definitely a scathing commentary on the monotonies of a simple nine to five kind of a lifestyle, it’s ironically one of the more conventional and straightforward additions to Hulbert’s discography thus far. A step away from the alternative and into the arms of pop simplicity, “Gone In One” is definitely a fun listen. 

Beyond the music video itself, there are a couple of elements here that just scream surrealism from the moment we first hear them to the second everything comes to an end at the four minute mark.

The diverse influences in Hulbert’s work start to rise to the surface; traces of a Beatles-esque pop and a Nirvana-style introspectiveness that I hadn’t heard in any of the tracklist in her debut album are present in this release, and moreover, they dominate the aesthetical backbone of every note we hear. Catharsis is plentiful, but so is the sense that she’s paying homage to her roots. 

Despite the thick swaths of competition emerging from virtually all sides of the American underground in the last few years, Lauren Hulbert is asserting herself as a true original with her most recent release, and further establishing hers as a sound consistently capable of evolving into something more intriguing than it was before. 2020 has been a startlingly good year for the indie pop genre all things considered, but in “Gone In One,” we get a taste of the style at its most commentarial as enhanced for a new chapter in this singer/songwriter’s career. 

Zachary Rush